Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Transformation Of The St. Clair Maritime Cultural Landscape From The Seventeenth To The Twentieth Centuries, Daniel Frederick Harrison

Wayne State University Dissertations

The St. Clair system—a river, delta and lake between Lake Huron and the Detroit River—offers significant opportunities to study long-term maritime landscape formation, and to preserve a unique resource. Few maritime landscapes in the Great Lakes remain so deeply and clearly inscribed by successive cultures. This permits both focused and comprehensive analyses and comparisons of the ideologies, technologies and practices of indigenous, colonial, and modern societies as each created its unique place in the environment through four processes: cognition, dwelling, movement, and representation. The socially-conditioned perception of environmental resources and constraints, and resulting strategies to exploit the former while minimizing …

Distillation Of Sound: Dub In Jamaica And The Creation Of Culture, Eric J. Abbey

Wayne State University Dissertations

In the early 1970s, the culture of Jamaica shifted politically and culturally with the introduction of the mixing board in music. This writing centers on the ways in which technology created a culture of dub reggae that has gone on to affect the world. The major albums and engineers that influenced this change are the focus here. By doing so, we can view how large changes in technology affected the society of Jamaica and how this led to significant cultural development. With Raymond Williams’ definition of culture and Thomas Vendrys’ structure of Dub music, the culture is defined, furthered, and …

Liquor Store Theatre: Ethnography & Contemporary Art In Detroit, Maya Stovall, Ph.D.

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

LIQUOR STORE THEATRE:

ETHNOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN DETROIT

by

MAYA STOVALL

2018

Advisor: Dr. Andrew D. Newman

Major: Anthropology

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Liquor Store Theatre is a study of the struggle for the city in contemporary Detroit. An ethnography completed over several years in an east side Detroit neighborhood called McDougall Hunt, the project exists in a variety of registers, working across contemporary art, performance, urban anthropology, critical geography, visual studies, film and new media, African American studies, and urban studies. The visual work of Liquor Store Theatre includes a four-volume, twenty-plus video episode meditation on city …

Healing The Social Body After Assisted Reproduction, Cvetana Cindy Golusin

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with the lived experiences of ten women after having children with In Vitro Fertilization. I examine the reshaped subjectivities that emerge within the women’s everyday life experiences to deepen understandings of human agency by exploring the intersection of assisted reproductive technologies, cultural ideologies, and social interactions as components in the transformation of the women’s identity. The experience of in vitro fertilization offered a fertile place in which to examine the roles that social and interpretive practices play in constituting the subjective experience in recasting a women’s identity. The study design consisted of informant interviews and case …

Emotion Meaning-Making: Identity, Discourse And Social Interaction Among Arab Immigrant Healthcare Providers, Anne Katz

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation sought to deepen understandings of emotion and its role in human personal and social life by exploring how a group of Arab immigrant health care providers, involved in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in one clinic in the United States, assign meaning to emotion. Affectively charged and fluid, often involving conditions of disruption and dislocation, the experience of migration offers a fertile place in which to examine the roles that social and interpretive practices play in constituting emotional experience. Due to increases in patterns of migration associated with globalization, mental health diagnoses are often arrived at …

Exploring Sacred Objects And Their Meanings In Catholic Mexicano Households: Domestic Religious Practices In San Antonio, Mary E. Durocher

Wayne State University Dissertations

Anthropological literature in the study of material culture argues that person/object interactions are important to the construction and maintenance of social relations and personal identity both in the present and through time. It is through relationships and interactions with things that people come to "know who they are" (Tilley (2007). This line of thinking has led some Latino studies scholars to propose that the retention of traditional aspects of culture, such as religious practices, often serves as a way of negotiating personal or cultural identity in an ever changing social milieu (Sandoval 2006, Aponte and De La Torre 2006). This …

Preterm Birth And The Perception Of Risk Among African Americans, Gwendolyn Simpson Norman

Wayne State University Dissertations

Background: African American women deliver preterm at a rate that is two to three times that of their white counterparts, and after decades of research, this disparity in birth outcomes still remains unexplained. While factors including income, education, neighborhood conditions, infection and stress have all been associated with prematurity, no combination of these factors has explained why the disparity persists. Recently, however, racism-specific stress has emerged as a possible factor contributing to this disparity. This study was designed to learn how preterm birth was explained by African Americans directly impacted by prematurity. Methods: Interviews were conducted with African American women …

"Still Here, Trying To Find My Way": Understanding The Experiences Of Hiv Disruption And Reorganization Among Older African Americans In Detroit, Andrea Nevedal

Wayne State University Dissertations

Adults aged fifty and older are the fastest growing age group with HIV/AIDS. Research on older adults with HIV has focused primarily on health status and physiological changes that occur as people age with HIV. However, little is known about the socio-cultural consequences that occur when older adults are diagnosed with HIV and as they age with HIV. Drawing from an anthropological approach to the life course and Becker's (1997) framework of life disruption, this dissertation research explored to what extent people experienced disruption from living with HIV and reorganized their lives after experiencing disruption.

The specific aims included identifying …